Sprint Nextel customers finally get the new BlackBerry they deserve, but does it live up to its name? Find out in our BlackBerry Curve 8350i review.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i:
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 We wish that buggy phones weren't par for the course for RIM these days, but the last few BlackBerry devices have all had significant problems, and we can now add the RIM BlackBerry 8350i on Sprint's Nextel network to that list. Strange problems aside, the Curve 8350i performed predictably well in the areas where RIM and Nextel excel. Battery life was excellent, and though call quality wasn't great, the list of calling features goes on and on when you use this phone as a walkie-talkie to communicate with a workforce in the field. To that end, this is easily the best Nextel smartphone on the market, but the other business phones on the iDen network are all years old at this point. Still, we're glad to see the new BlackBerry OS 4.6, which looks great, and we were surprised by the phone's music playing abilities. If the kinks can get ironed out, this will be a great walkie-talkie phone for e-mail on the go. Release: December 2008. Price: $150.
Pros: Very good design with large keys and an updated BlackBerry user interface.
Cons: Another buggy BlackBerry. iDen network slows to a crawl, wish they had used EV-DO Rev. A for PTT.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i Review:
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Design – Very Good
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i looks exactly like a Nextel BlackBerry device should. It's basically the same design as the BlackBerry Curve 8330, only a bit thicker and with some accents that identify it as a more durable, walkie-talkie phone. There's a push-to-talk (PTT) button on the side, ringed in a bright yellow accent that screams Nextel. The trackball is similarly ringed, and recessed a bit deeper into the phone. We found this made serious scrolling more difficult, but the slick, revamped BlackBerry OS 4.6 hardly required serious scrolling. The full QWERTY keyboard seemed a bit more pronounced on the BlackBerry Curve 8350i, and this made it much easier to use. We tried typing with some gloves on, and it was difficult, but not impossible.
Though the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i may resemble yesterday's Curve 8330, instead of the newer BlackBerry Curve 8900, the Nextel Curve gets the newest BlackBerry interface design. We were more impressed with the sleek, blue on black icons on the BlackBerry Bold, where they popped on the Bold's superlative screen. But even here, they help the Curve 8350i feel like a modern BlackBerry. That's nice, because the last RIM BlackBerry device on Nextel was the still-lingering RIM BlackBerry 7100i, released 3.5 years ago.
Calling – Very Good
Though the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i has the walkie-talkie calling features that Nextel users crave, it also comes with some of the problems of the aging iDen network. The most impressive calls we made were unsurprisingly Direct Connect calls to a Sanyo Pro 200 Sprint was kind enough to lend us. The speaker on the Curve 8350i is impressively loud, as it should be, and we love the quick connect features that Nextel's servie affords. Unfortunately, plain old cell phone calling was more problematic. Call quality was okay, but not great. Callers reported plenty of buzz and static in the background, and voice quality on both ends was sub-par. Even worse, we encountered numerous bugs on the BlackBerry Curve 8350i, the worst of which affected calls. Often, the phone would fail to complete a dialed call, claiming "Radio Path Unavailable," a cryptic warning, indeed. Perhaps this was due to reception problems, as the phone often lost iDen service completely in our suburban New Jersey testing grounds.
Battery life was impressive, and we were glad to see RIM keeping its habit of underestimating battery life by a mile. RIM promises 4 hours of talk time, but we got nearly 7 hours in a single call, with Wi-Fi turned off. All of our favorite calling features are available, as well. We found the speaker-independent voice dialing easy to use. Conference calling was especially robust, with all of the group options for Nextel offering some truly impressive, and long range, walkie-talkie capabilities. The phone also connected to our Bluetooth headphones with no trouble.
Messaging – Very Good
Messaging should be the BlackBerry Curve 8350i's strong suit, but again we found some bugs on the phone that caused problems. The phone comes packed with a nice assortment of instant messaging clients, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo and even Gtalk, our current favorite. We tried chatting with friends, but found a significant lag when we were using the slower cellular network for data, as opposed to Wi-Fi. We often were dropped and had to reconnect to a chat. Then, the IM apps strangely disappeared. All of the apps disappeared from the device, leaving only the BlackBerry Messenger client, which works only with other RIM BlackBerry devices.
We had more trouble connecting to our Gmail account. We set up the phone a few days ago with Gmail, and the device diligently downloaded all 300+ messages in our inbox as if they were new. Fair enough, since the device chose to connect with a POP connection instead of our preferred IMAP. But at the time of writing, the Gmail app showed the correct date at the top of the screen, but then incorrectly displayed e-mail from our original sync as having arrived this evening. Messages days old appeared to have arrived today, and the Gmail would no longer reconcile our account over the cellular or Wi-Fi network.
On a positive note, the keyboard on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i is among the best we've used on any smartphone. The large keys are raised high off the phone's face, separated by a nice amount of space, and angled just slightly. All of these features made typing a breeze. RIM did a nice job taking advantage of the Curve 8350i's larger size, and it paid off on the keys. If only they had cleaned up the bugs on the programs where we actually wanted to do some typing.
Scheduling and Productivity – Good
The calendar app on the BlackBerry Curve 8350i isn't pretty, but it gets the job done. The BlackBerry calendar is about as robust and powerful as the calendar on Windows Mobile, and both share the top spot in this class. For productivity apps, the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i gets DataViz' Documents To Go, but not the premium version. If you just want to read and edit your Office documents, the Curve 8350i can handle that, but if you want to create a new document or dip into some of the truly advanced features, you'll need to pay for the upgrade.
Music – Very Good
When we plugged the BlackBerry Curve 8350i into our MacBook Pro to charge, we had forgotten about the BlackBerry Media Sync app we installed while reviewing T-Mobile's Curve 8900. So we were pleasantly surprised when the Media Sync app popped up automatically and offered to synchronize our non-DRM iTunes tracks to the Curve 8350i's 1GB microSD card. Even in this beta version, Media Sync worked very well, and our tracks came through with album artwork in tact. Playback options were limited, but the extra beefy speaker on this walkie-talkie phone made for impressively loud music. We would have liked a 3.5mm headphone jack, but at least the Curve 8350i uses a somewhat standard 2.5mm jack, and stereo Bluetooth worked well in our tests with our wireless speaker.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i did an acceptable job rendering full HTML pages, but our own site came out a little awkward looking, as some of the layout didn't quite align properly. At full zoom, pictures and text looked nice and sharp. Unfortunately, browsing on this device was unbearably slow. Whether we were using the sluggish iDen network for data or the built-in Wi-Fi, the Web browser chugged along slower than most browsers we've used. Even loading Google search results was a chore, let alone a large, complicated page like our image-heavy homepage. Performance is a serious issue all around on this phone, and no where is it felt more than in the Web browser.
Camera - Poor
We say this often, but the camera on the BlackBerry Curve 8350i really is among the worst we've seen on a cell phone. Just about everything that could go bad did. Pictures were blurry, as if they were shot during an earthquake. Colors were washed out and insipid. White spots were overexposed, and images had an overall oversharpened effect, as if we were looking at an old TV set.
GPS Navigation - Good
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i comes loaded with plenty of GPS options, but it lacks a key element to using the navigation services on the go. You get BlackBerry Maps and TeleNav preloaded onto the phone, and Google Maps for BlackBerry is also available for the device. We won't fault TeleNav or RIM's own Maps program for our trouble. The phone found us quickly and dropped a pin onto the map right away showing our location. Then, the phone chugged along on the archaic iDen network, trying to load up the street map of our location. The slow network held back the navigation software to the point that it was almost unusable, except in a real pinch.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i will start selling for $150 ((Sprint)) in December 2008.
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